Followers

Blog Archive

About Me

I'm a very happy husband and stepfather. I do enjoy a number of hobbies in my spare time: Amateur radio (my callsign is N8OIF), geocaching (my caching name is erayboul), photography, videography, and computer programming at the hobbyist level.

I've been an amateur radio operator since 1991. For 16 years, I was a Technician class licensee and enjoyed using 2-meter and 70-cm repeaters. In 2007, I upgraded to the Amateur Extra class level and am really starting to enjoy HF communications, especially the various digital modes.

I also immensely enjoy photography. I have taken pictures off and on since being a teenager. I got more serious with photography after getting out on my own. I involve myself with several different disciplines within photography, including shooting landscapes, portraits, and general photojournalism. I have been the key photographer for six or seven weddings of close friends and have been involved with videography on some of those weddings as well. I am primarily self-taught in this field and I do not derive any income from it. As much as I enjoy photography, I don't think that my photos are in the same league as many of the professional photographs that I have seen.

Another pasttime that I enjoy is geocaching. It gets me outdoors. I originally started geocaching in the summer of 2002. I found five or six geocaches and then dropped the hobby for over eight years. I picked it up again in September of 2010 and have "cached" steadily since.

A renewed interest of mine is sound recording. I suppose most people would refer to my style of recording as ambient or field recording, i.e the recording of the sounds of nature. As a teenager, I remember bringing my cassette deck and a pair of inexpensive Radio Shack (Realistic) microphones outdoors (with overhead protection) and recording thunderstorms, or recording fireworks on the 4th of July. I'm now interested in doing those types of recordings again (and much more), although now in the digital domain which much better microphones. I'm also interested in audio for video and am looking to improve upon the audio that my dSLR or my camcorder records.

My programming skills are very limited. I've learned languages such as BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, Visual Basic, and I have also learned Active Server Pages, Perl, HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, some VBscript, and some Javascript. Some of my programming expertise was used in my paying job and some has been used at home for amateur radio related projects or websites.